Persona 4 Golden Playthrough Part Three
0What is the truth? Who's to say? The Investigation Team, that's who! Make friends with your classmates and investigate some gruesome murders to find the secret that lies beneath Inaba's peaceful exterior!
Fefnir note: The timestamps are a little wonky because I wasn't quite sure how to split a game like this up. I pondered labeling by dungeons, months, and just certain big events, but nothing felt incredible, so I settled on months. Sorry if this makes it hard to find something specific!
00:00 - Recap
3:02 - Naoto
54:47 - Secret Laboratory
6:33:47 - Heaven
Part Four: https://youtu.be/ucHu9EOObx0
REVIEW: 5/5
Steam link here: https://steamcommunity.com/id/fefnirirl/recommended/1113000/
P4G was my first foray into the Persona series, and honestly, what an incredible showing! I think it's super easy for JRPGs to fall into a traditional slump, where you're doing turn-based combat, journeying across a mythical land, creating a party of knights, wizards, rogues, and fighting the same archetypes of enemies that dozens of other games have provided you with. Persona 4 goes, "Boink everything you know about that; we're gonna do it, but we're gonna do it better, and we're gonna do it weird."
The dungeons are all weird and are based on a different theme; they represent a corrupted version of someone's heart, so you face their deepest fears and insecurities as you traverse. They're also divided by checkpoints, only needing to be conquered by a specific in-game date, so you can come and go as you please, leaving the dungeoneering to another day if your party is spent. This, of course, is the coward's option, as everyone knows you should always complete the dungeon in its entirety on day one so as to leave the most time available to nurturing your Social Links.
The Social Links were an awesome addition to the experience, as the game wasn't entirely focused around exploring/fighting/grinding, and it was a cool feature to explore the characters you spend the game with. It was set up in a way that you were never forced to advance any character's link if you didn't want to, so you could just max out the characters that you liked and spend your free time doing other activities. This was actually one of my favorite parts of the game though, so I tried to complete as many characters' links as possible. This also led to them getting new Personas, and you gained the ability to craft an ultimate Persona of their given tarot card, so there is incentive.
The music in this game trumps every other game I've played by a good amount. None of the repeating music, such as the town or combat themes, get repetitive, and each dungeon has its own theme that also goes hard; really I would just struggle to find a bad song in the soundtrack. When it released on Spotify, I was listening to it pretty non-stop, as there is enough music in the line-up that it wouldn't get old. Even if it did, I could listen to "Affection, Affection" on cooldown.
Honestly, unless you hate turn-based combat or anime-styled games, I think this is worth the pickup.